BRUNETIÈRE, FERDINAND. - French literary critic, b. in Toulon on 19 July 1849, d. in Paris on 9 Dec. 1906. He began contributing to the Revue des Deux Mondes as early as 1875, becoming its director in 1895. In 1886 he was appointed "maître de conférences" at the École normale supérieure in Paris. A member of the Académie française from 1895.
A profound connoisseur of the French seventeenth century, endowed with extensive philosophical and scientific reading, which (rather than elaborating with independence of thought) he subordinated to his constant polemical effort, B. strove several times to reconcile Darwin and Spencer with the history of literary genres, arriving at bold but unsound inferences. His critical methodology was empirical, bound more than anything else to an eminently classicist, anti-decadent, anti-impressionistic evaluation of literature, drawing ever closer to the poetic and cultural taste of the French Renaissance (see the 9 vols. of the Etudes critiques sur l'histoire de la littérature française [Paris 1880-1925]; Le roman naturaliste [ibid. 1883]; Histoire de la littérature française classique [ibid. 1904]).
Highly important for the history of French Catholic thought and culture is his return to religion, whose ideal stages can be documented in La science et la religion [ibid. 1895]. Skillfully bending and resolving the conclusions of Comte's positivism within Christian thought, he waged a most refined battle against Renan (v. Cinq lettres sur E. R. [ibid. 1903], and Pages sur E. R. [ibid. 1924]), in favor of the bourgeois social tradition of Catholic France (cf. his social and political "raisons" in the Discours de combat [ibid. 1900-1907]), in favor of a classical-Catholic "restoration" of the French spirit.
Bibliography10 works
der Lugt, L'action religieuse de F. B., Paris 1936; E. Hocking, F. B., the evolution of a critic, Madison 1936; V. Giraud, La critique littéraire, Paris 1945, pp. 30 ff., 185 ff.